Deciphering the papal bull session

President Barack Obama and Pope Francis smiled and joked with each other when they met for the first time Thursday — but the official accounts of the meeting weren’t as in sync.

Obama, pressed on the details of the private meeting at the Vatican Thursday, said that the “bulk” of the conversation had focused on income inequality and world peace, with a particular interest in the Middle East.

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The Vatican statement about the meeting didn’t even mention income inequality, saying instead the president and the pope had discussed “the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection” — not-so-subtle code for abortion and the concerns with the Obamacare contraception mandate that conservative Catholics had been hoping Francis would press the president on.

Still, both seemed to walk away from the meeting with what they wanted.

For months, Obama and his aides have tried to stress the connections between the president’s focus on helping people struggling in the economy and the jesuitical ministering to the needy that Francis has elevated in the Vatican since being elected last March.

Thursday, they got the footage to go along with that message, along with video of Obama, in Rome at a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, speaking at length about the inspiration he draws from Francis’s words.

There’s a “convergence between what policy makers need to be thinking about and what he’s talking about,” Obama said. “He’s not going to get into the details of it, but he reminds us.”

Obama, though, stressed that Francis “did not touch in detail” on Obamacare either. That, he said, was left to Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin in an ancillary meeting they had right afterward at the Vatican, allowing church authorities to remind people that they’d pressed the issue without the discomfort of having the pope be the one to talk tough.

“We actually did not talk a lot about social schisms,” Obama said of his meting with Francis. “That wasn’t really a topic of conversation.”

In his meeting with Parolin, Obama said, “we discussed briefly the issue of making sure that conscience and religious freedom was observed in the context of applying the law.”

Unlike the summaries the White House releases for most private meetings the president has with officials — carefully-crafted statements stressing the official version — its readout of the papal bull session was simply an excerpted transcript of Obama’s comments at the press conference.

As for the pope and the president, they exchanged presents. They posed for official photos with Secretary of State John Kerry and top White House staffers. There was even an official invitation to return the favor by hosting Francis in Washington.

And then, a few hours later, Obama got to talk about how much of their conversation had focused on their shared interest in helping “the poor, marginalized, those without opportunity, and growing inequality.”

“Those of us as politicians have the task of trying to come up with policies to address issues,” Obama said. “His Holiness has the capacity to open people’s eyes and see this is an issue.”